Family: Wife, Camille, whom he married in 1992; sons, James, 61, an attorney in Massachusetts; and Larry, 57, who lives in Seattle, Wash.; stepsons, Nicholas Centrella, 50, and Christopher Centrella, 46; four grandchildren. His first wife, Lisl, died in 1974.

Job: Retired; moved to Stroudsburg in 1952 and started a shoe factory on Dreher Avenue; started a blouse factory in 1960 near Shafer Schoolhouse Road; sold it in 1982. He is now a lecturer and educator who travels the world to educate people, especially young people, about the Holocaust.

Education: Was forced out of school because he was a Jew when Adolph Hitler came to power in 1933; took the SAT exams and enrolled in New York University, graduating in 1989.

Why he lectures: When he was at NYU, a psychology professor asked him why he didn’t talk about his experiences, and it made him think. He speaks to young people because he says they can’t relate to World War I and II because they are ancient history to them. He also speaks to adults about the Holocaust and shares the ways it changed him and turned him into the man he is today.

» Social News

Tom Breslauer lives to tell his story, and people flock to wherever he’s talking to hear it.

His story is compelling.

He is a Holocaust survivor who wound his way from Germany to England to the United States and back to Germany, all during World War II.

Born Fritz Breslauer in Hamburg, Germany, in 1916, he is the son of a German soldier who was killed in World War I before he was born and a woman who died in a concentration camp under the Nazis in 1941.

He was forced to leave school when Adolph Hitler came to power in 1933 and went to work in a shoe factory in Offenbach; he was arrested on Nov. 9, 1938, on Kristallknacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” when thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to the Dachau prison camp, where he endured five months of hunger and brutal work.

He was released from the camp when a generous American gave him an affidavit to come to the United States, finally getting here in March of 1940 by way of England, where he was arrested on suspicion of being a German spy and held for a time. He filed the paperwork to begin the process of becoming an American citizen, which made him eligible for the draft. He eventually found himself back in Germany with the American army.

Breslauer said that it wasn’t hard to fight the Nazis in Europe.

“I had so much hate in me because of what they did to my family. I just wanted to win the war,” he said.

He has hundreds of photos of his family and can still point out the relatives who died in the camps. He is matter-of-fact but still grows emotional when talking about his mother.

He wanted to find out what had happened to his mother and was given a book that listed some 7,000 names of Hamburg residents who had been killed in the camps. He says that when he opened the book, it opened to the page where his mother’s name was.

“It just jumped out at me,” he said, growing silent for a minute. He shared a photo that he has showing a plaque that is on the house where she was living when she was arrested. There are three question marks under her name, signifying that her fate had been unknown at the time.

“But she died in a camp,” Breslauer said. “They (the Nazis) killed her.”

He also has a photo of his family, including all of the aunts, uncles and cousins who were eventually killed by the Nazis.

After the war, he opened a shoe factory and a blouse factory in the Stroudsburg area. After retiring in 1982, he decided to go to school. He got his high school diploma, then went to New York University and got a bachelor’s degree in 1989.

“One of my psychology teachers asked me if I ever talked about my experiences, and I said, ‘No.’ He encouraged me to talk about it and share it with others,” he said. “So in 1989, I started telling people about what happened and how it changed me.”

It became his life’s work.

Now 91, Breslauer has traveled the United States and the world, talking to people about the war and educating them about the Holocaust and the horror endured by people whose only crime was being Jewish.

His first wife, Lisl, died in 1974, and he spent the following years traveling and talking to people about the Holocaust. In 1992, he married Camille, who has encouraged him and still supports his efforts. They live quietly in Stroudsburg, where they are active at Temple Israel, where Breslauer served as temple president. He is also an active member of Mensa, the organization for those who score in the 98th percentile on IQ tests.

His accomplishments are too many to list, but they include graduation from the summer program at Oxford University in England, active membership in the Rotary Club and past presidency of the American Cancer Society.

He has lectured to more than 300 student and adult groups all over the country. In 2002, he received the Yitzhak Rabin Award, given for distinguished service to the Jewish community.

He was nominated for the honor by the members of Temple Israel because of his distinctive history.

He ends each talk with the same words: “Don’t ever hate, no matter who or what they are or what they’ve done. Have respect for human life. And don’t ever smoke.”